Chinatown's champion

SUNDAY PROFILE: Rose Pak

Rose Pak is seen in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday September 17, 2010.

Rose Pak is seen in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday September 17, 2010.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

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Rose Pak is seen in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday September 17, 2010.

Rose Pak is seen in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday September 17, 2010.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

Chinatown's champion

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Rose Pak was a 24-year-old newspaper reporter in 1972 when she found herself in a court battle with a lawyer accused of throwing an angry punch at her during an interview at his house.

Pak "is an extremely pushy person," the attorney said during his trial on battery charges.

Not exactly, Pak said when she was called to the witness stand. "I was trained to be persistent," she said.

Pushy or persistent, it's that relentless determination that has made the Hunan-born immigrant a powerful figure in San Francisco politics and a tireless advocate for her Chinatown community.

"I got involved by necessity," Pak said in an interview at the Hilton Hotel on Kearny Street, just across the street from Chinatown's Portsmouth Square. "I needed to get responsive people to care for the community. But you get into one project and it leads to another and it never seems to end."

Working from her longtime base as a consultant for the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Pak has been involved in nearly every fight that has affected Chinatown for more than 30 years.

"I've tried to make a difference," she said. "Stabilizing Chinatown rents, helping save Chinese Hospital ... there are a lot of things where I can say, 'I'm glad I took part in that.' "

But the outspoken Pak hasn't been afraid to move out of the Chinatown community and become involved in the blood sport of San Francisco politics, using her clout to boost the careers of both Asian Americans and others who could help her community.

During that time, Pak has seen the city's Asian American community grow both in size and political power, changing from a Chinatown-based minority that couldn't even elect one of its own to represent the district to a citywide force that has put Asian Americans in many of San Francisco's top political and civic posts.

A polarizing figure

Her political work has made her plenty of friends and probably just as many enemies, both inside and outside the Chinese community. It's something she professes not to spend much time worrying about.

"You can't be so afraid of offending anyone that you don't do anything," Pak said. "If people take positions I don't agree with, am I just going to roll over and pretend to be dead? No, I'm going to fight."

One of the nastiest skirmishes was with the Falun Gong, a controversial sect that has been banned in China. Since 2004, the group has been barred from San Francisco's annual Chinese New Year's Parade, which is sponsored by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and organized by Pak.

Pak and the chamber have argued that the group is too political for the family-oriented parade, but supporters of Falun Gong, including Supervisor Chris Daly, have accused her of doing the bidding of China's leaders.

Daly also met with the FBI in 2006 to discuss those purported ties to the Chinese government.

Pak, who has repeatedly denied any connection with Beijing leaders, had a quick reply to any FBI investigation: "Bring 'em on," she said in an interview.

Making enemies just goes with the territory in San Francisco politics, said former Mayor Willie Brown, who worked closely with Pak during his eight years in office.

He called Pak "a comprehensive activist," who not only worked with him on Chinatown issues such as economic development, historical preservation and the upgrading of the community's historic alleyways, but also to diversify his administration.

"No one has lasted as long as Rose," he said.

Activism has come at a price, Pak said.

"It was a choice that I did not get married, that I did not have children," she said. "It would have taken time from the work I do."

Pak, now in her early 60s, was born in China's Hunan Province, but fled to British-run Hong Kong with her mother and sisters. She was educated there and at a boarding school in Macao and came to the United States in 1967 to study communications at San Francisco College for Women.

After getting a journalism degree from Columbia University in New York City, she returned to San Francisco in 1971 and worked as a general assignment reporter for The Chronicle.

"She was feisty and funny and wouldn't back down to anyone," recalled Carl Nolte, a Chronicle reporter who worked with Pak.

A new direction

But after about six years, Pak decided that writing about Chinatown and the city wasn't enough. Her mother had died just days before she was scheduled to move to the United States and that helped convince Pak it was time for a change.

"I lost my anchor for awhile," she said. "I didn't need to support my mother anymore and felt I could do community work that was more important."

Pak quickly saw that if politics was power in San Francisco, the Chinese community wasn't even in the game. It wasn't until 1977 that San Francisco elected an Asian American to the Board of Supervisors, and Gordon Lau served just two years before he was defeated in his re-election effort.

"Politicians find all the connections in Chinatown too complicated," Pak said. "So they just show up for Chinese New Year, where it's 'Gung hay fat choy' and goodbye."

Pak worked to change that, by showing the city's politicians that they needed the support of her community.

"Connections are important (with politicians), as are relationships," she said. "You have to build those relationships."

"San Francisco is still a small town where relationships are king, and Rose Pak has built those relationships over decades, which gives her credibility," he said.

To Pak, it was the unwillingness of former Supervisor Ed Jew and former Housing Commissioner Julie Lee to build those long-term political relationships and learn how to work inside government that helped send them both to jail.

Both Jew and Lee were connected to the growing Asian American community in San Francisco's Sunset District, well away from Pak's Chinatown base. While they often traveled in the same political circles, there was little love lost among them.

Jew was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2006, but less than a year later he was charged with extorting $80,000 from small businesses seeking permits from the city. He was sentenced to five years in federal prison

Lee was named to the Housing Commission in 1999 and reappointed in 2002. She was sentenced to a year in prison after being convicted of state and federal charges of funneling state grant money to Democrat Kevin Shelley's 2002 campaign for secretary of state. Shelley resigned in the wake of the scandal.

The people who run into trouble "were those who didn't pay attention to the process; they wanted shortcuts," Pak said. "That's what happened to people like Julie Lee and Ed Jew."

Perception of power

There were plenty of people, both inside and outside of Chinatown, who weren't willing to talk on the record about Pak.

"Rose is a political operative," said one person who said he wasn't looking for a fight. "If you're on her side, she'll protect you, but if you're not, she'll throw you under the bus."

Pak argues that people credit her with far more political clout - or interest - than she actually has.

"People think I hang around City Hall all day, carrying somebody's water or doing somebody in," she said. "If someone (in Chinatown) doesn't get a permit, they blame me. I don't even know where the Department of Building Inspection is, but why should I tell them that?

"Power is an illusion. If people think you've got it, you've got it."

Pak says her biggest advantage as a community activist is that she has no ambitions for herself.

"I don't want to see my name in the paper. I don't want to be chair of a committee. Money doesn't turn me on," she said. "I've outlasted a lot of people because I don't want anything."

But there are plenty of things she wants for her community. When Brown was mayor, Pak had the reputation as his gatekeeper for the Asian community. She pushed hard to get Fred Lau named as San Francisco's first Asian American chief of police and wasn't afraid to fight for the appointment.

When Jack Davis, a political consultant close to Brown, complained in 1996 that Lau was a "lightweight" who lied on his resume, Pak threatened to withdraw her support for the campaign to build Pac Bell Park unless Davis was bounced from his job running that effort. Harsh words and charges flew in both directions, forcing Brown to quickly broker a truce.

Chinatown's fighter

You can't be afraid to fight with your friends, if that's what's best for the community, Pak said.

"You have to fight twice as hard against a friend as against an enemy or you have no credibility," she added.

That's why, despite her support for former Mayor Art Agnos, she challenged his attempts to tear down the Embarcadero Freeway, first in a 1987 ballot measure and then again after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, arguing that the loss of fast, crosstown access would be an economic disaster for Chinatown.

She won the ballot battle, but couldn't convince the supervisors to rebuild the freeway after the earthquake.

But for Pak, who prides herself on taking the long view, losing a battle doesn't mean losing the war. She was quickly involved in plans for a new $1.7 billion Central Subway to extend the Third Street light rail line from the Caltrain station at Fourth and King streets underground to Chinatown.

There have been plenty of complaints about the cost and effectiveness of the 1.7-mile extension and suggestions that it was little more than a political payoff to Chinatown. Both supporters and opponents of the subway give Pak credit - or blame - for keeping the project alive, but she's proud of her role. "They owed it to us," she said. "Willie Brown understood what the fight was all about. It was not about beauty or aesthetic things, but that people's livelihoods depended on" good transportation access.

That's the type of issue worth fighting to keep Chinatown as a changing, thriving and vibrant community rather than some static historical monument.

"Hospitals, housing, transportation are all things that involve people's daily lives," Pak said. "In order to have a stable business community, you have to care about transportation, care about housing. They create the ambiance the community needs."

That's one reason that she's now serving as head of fundraising for the effort to rebuild Chinese Hospital

"I don't know if I'm the best person, but someone had to do it," she said.

Pak calls herself an "old fossil," who has seen plenty of changes in her community over the decades. But more is needed and she plans to be there, pushing to improve Chinatown and the future of the city's Asian American community.

"Politicians come and go, but I will stay here," she said. "I won't go anywhere else."